Good morning to everyone. I’m nursing a bum ankle from a non-contact injury I sustained during my late night Men Behaving Poorly soccer league, so I’m wishing that the big pills in the little orange jar were something stronger than ibuprofen right about now.
I also got to see Kid #1 do an amazing job being a bumble bee. Ice cream was the only way to reward such an emotive and vital performance.
Other than that, open thread.
Ash Can
Sounds like an eventful day all around. And maybe you need to administer ice cream to yourself now.
Chyron HR
Stupid bleding-heart libs. Your bum ankle won’t get any better unless you take it off welfare and make it WORK.
Randy P
Anyone know their way around congress.gov? I’m trying to figure out the status of the new Continuing Resolution if any, trying to track the potential shutdown. I found one news article that claims it’s up for a vote tomorrow. But on congress.gov I’ve been unable to find any mention of tomorrow at all. All calendars seem to be today only.
Does Congress exist in a weird time bubble in which there is no yesterday or tomorrow?
MomSense
@Randy P:
I usually go to this site http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php to see the various iterations or I go to votesmart.org
You can also check in on the pages for individual members to see what is happening. Boehner, Pelosi, etc will have updates more often than others.
MomSense
@Randy P:
I just checked on thomas and it lists it as an item that may be considered.
gogol's wife
Maureen Dowd has really jumped the shark this morning. Her admiration for Putin knows no bounds. Paraphrase because I refuse to look at her putrid text again: “Obama’s and Kerry’s saber-rattling looked like knees rattling when Vlad shut them down.”
Will someone rid me of this disgusting excuse for an op-ed columnist? She makes Douthat look like Montaigne.
negative 1
Trust a guy who just had oral surgery last week — the high powered stuff doesn’t work as well for immediate pain as ibuprofen does. It’s just that if that doesn’t work your only hope is to beg for novacaine injections (I haven’t found anyone yet who does them on request, not even if you call their homes at 2 a.m. begging).
chopper
@gogol’s wife:
eh, she just likes putin because he looks like her ex-boyfriend. or something.
Jebediah
David Sirota has a piece up on Salon that seems basically to be calling the President a dumb doody-head and mocking the 11-d chess meme. I don’t know if the President can actually play chess in eleven dimensions, but his political opponents do frequently end up publicly pantsed. Which I guess proves that Obama isn’t a shrewd political strategist who can think a few moves ahead, or something.
I am embarrassed to admit I used to think Sirota was worth reading.
StringOnAStick
@negative 1: Ibuprofen and Narcotic-based (prescription) pain relievers target different mechanisms; ibu and the rest of the NSAIDs target the inflammation at the site of the injury, narcotics target the brain’s perception of pain. This is why most prescribed narcotics contain a combination of codeine and an NSAID. It is also why when they give you something with a narcotic pain reliever and tell you to start taking them before the prior pain control wears off (from surgery, for example), they are giving you some very, very important information that you should pay attention to even if they didn’t explain why. Also, ibu and the rest work best when taken regularly.
One last thing: novacaine hasn’t been used in this country for years, especially in dentistry; almost everything is Lidocaine or Carbocaine now. As soon as you tell the DDS that “the novacaine you gave me didn’t work” you’ve immediately ID’d yourself as someone who doesn’t really know what their talking about regarding local anesthetic and the docs tune you out and give a lot less credibility in your requests. Word to the wise here…. If you were referring to a case of “please, please, please numb up this abscess before my head explodes” the sad news is that local anesthetics work very poorly at the site of an infection (it is a local pH issue, and LA doesn’t work well in acid conditions). That’s why they gave you a strong does of antibiotics and had you come back in later for the treatment of the abscessed tooth.
Mnemosyne
@StringOnAStick:
The last couple of times I had a root canal, the endodontist gave me an actual schedule on which to take the ibuprofen — that’s how important he felt it was for pain control.
(I have weird curly roots, so I have to go straight to the endo for my root canals — my regular dentist just doesn’t have the specialized equipment he would need to see them.)
ETA: He also gave me the minimum number of Tylenol-3, which was still way more than I used. I think I took one so I could sleep that night and that was it. Opiates don’t do much for me except make me cranky.
burnspbesq
@Jebediah:
He was worth reading until fairly recently. Heck, up until around late 2007, Greenwald was must-read-daily. Don’t know what happened to these guys.
Oh, and just because I can … DOS A CERO!
Jebediah
@burnspbesq:
If I had paused to think a little longer before commenting, I might have remembered that. From the always-been-useless hacks, you know what to expect. It’s dismaying when a useful writer loses it.
LanceThruster
9/11 is the litmus test.
So many of the things that reverberate to today are based on the unwillingness to demand full,
open and transparent investigations of the attack, the crime scene forensics,
and the apparent response failures. Anyone not in lockstep with the coming
“payback” was a traitor, and anyone questioning the official
narrative was a nutter. That the people so readily dismissing the skeptics, did
not heed to call themselves to demand what the commission itself determined;
that a proper investigation was needed to uncover the truth.
Remember, the alternate explanation to deride conspiracy, was the supposedly comforting
notion that incompetence, an unrelated type of criminality (the destruction of
evidence), the desire to cover your butt, and a string of bad luck and/or
remarkable coincidence, explained the seeming contradictions and that the right
enemy had been targeted anyway, so no time to navel gaze as we needed to get
our bloodbath up and running.
My recollection is somewhat shorter as to what I saw and what we lost. I live in
So Cal and commute to downtown LA, and have for over 20+ years. For *exactly* a
day and a half (the same amount of time the air stays smog free after a good
rain), the normally selfish and inattentive motorists drove in manner virtually
unseen before or since. Over that two day period, they actually showed noticeable
consideration and no longer drove oblivious to those around them, not caring
who they cut off or didn’t let in or honked at for going too slow, or not getting
out of the way fast enough…they treated the other drivers as fellow Americans
that were also possibly traumatized or numb and that the default position might
be that they would appreciate a random act of kindness from a stranger who
might just cut another person a break for no other reason than they thought the
anonymous person could use one.
And then, as if it never happened in the first place, it was over. That was how long it took
to revert back to type, and embrace dysfunction as normalcy.
And that’s how we got to where we are today.
There are some things in life that we can’t turn back the clock on, but tragically that
is true even on those things we could turn back the clock on. We’re just not
that smart or that caring, and I don’t think it’s overly pessimistic to say
that we never will be.
negative 1
@StringOnAStick: Neither actually. Had my wisdom teeth out (boy I do love having dental insurance). They gave me Vicodin and it didn’t do squat. Basically I sat around counting the minutes until it was time to have more ibuprofin. And wondering whether whatever anesthetic they shot into my gums could be obtained over the counter or on the street.
Linkmeister
Ahem. Where is the picture of the child as bumblebee?